


Pestilence

by Buttons15



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-14 04:05:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11200092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Buttons15/pseuds/Buttons15
Summary: When Angela produced her first immunity-inducing nanobot, she thought infectious diseases had their days counted.Mother nature was bound to prove her otherwise.





	Pestilence

Angela used to be afraid of the dark, when she was a kid. Of the dark, and of loud noises. This was different – it was dark, yes, but also unnaturally quiet, and somehow it was a thousand times worse. She could hear her own breathing, way too fast, a constant reminder that fear was there, regardless of how hard she tried to ignore it.

And she was not alone. Around her, everywhere, creeping and crawling, she could feel a very distinct and oppressive _presence,_ something even her genius brain had no hopes of making sense of. On the back of her mind, she knew she had to be dreaming, yet it did nothing to soothe the anguish hat crushed her.

_The airplane,_ she forced herself to remember. _I’m in the middle of a flight –_

A sound. It was distant at first, just a quiet little buzzing far, far away, and then as it got closer she realized it was not one sound but many, millions of hums in perfect synch. They grew louder, terrifying, drowning out any semblance of rational thought and reverting her mind to raw animalistic panic.

Angela crouched, covered her ears and screamed.

_The mouth,_ her mind incoherently supplied, _Oh god they’re coming through the mouth –_

She jumped on her seat as she woke, gasping for air, startling the passenger next to her from his sleep. Ignoring the man’s angry look, she touched her cheek, sticky with cold sweat, then let out a slow, trembling breath.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re now beginning our descent into Cairo International Airport…”

Angela grabbed the bottle of water she’d shoved on the back pocket of the seat ahead of her, only to find it empty. Sighing, she looked out the window and let her mind wander to the city below. She’d been in Cairo before – she’d been everywhere, really – but from above it was easy to see how the Omnic Crisis had reached there, too.

Egypt had taken a huge toll from the conflicts – it was, after all, where they both started – and even after the god programs Osiris and Anubis had been taken down, the country remained dangerously unstable.

_Osiris and Anubis,_ she mused bitterly. _Two down, one entire pantheon to go._

 

* * *

Angela put on her white coat, then cursed when she saw the coffee stain on her sleeve. Folding it up to her elbow to hide it, she shivered when she entered the cold autopsy room. The pathologist was already waiting for her.

“Good evening, doctor Ziegler.”

“Good evening, doctor…”Angela hesitated. Naming conventions in Egypt were hard for her to work out because surnames were usually just the father’s name, so she always felt as if she was referring to anyone by first name, and the wrong one at that _._

“Ahmed,” the other offered. “Gamila Ahmed.”

“Ahmed,” she nodded. “Pardon my delay. I came as soon as I finished reading your email.”

They walked over to the large metal drawers, Angela slipping her hands into a pair of nitrile gloves as she moved. Gamila pulled open one of the containers and carefully unzipped the black plastic bag within, revealing the lifeless face of a young man. Even though the ambient was downright icy, she was hit with a nauseating smell.

His face was twisted in a grimace of pain, eyes closed. Very carefully, Angela lifted one of the eyelids open to see a reddish brown, transversal discoloration on the sclera.

“ _Tache noir,”_ she whispered, barely audible. It meant the victim had died with their eyes open – a telltale sign of a violent passing. “Cause of death?” she queried, even though Ahmed had mentioned it on previous communication.

“Car accident.” The other tapped the man’s side, where bone protruded from skin. “Broken rib perforated the pleura, then bled into the cavity. A classical cardiac tamponade, except by the time his heart stopped beating he was already brain dead from diffuse axonal lesion.”

It bothered Angela greatly that she didn’t know his name. “Mmhm.” She leaned in to inspect the corpse. “Weight of the lungs?” she asked, mostly as a formality. The lungs, like sponges, would hold on to the blood, making them considerably heavier than normal.

“Eight hundred and two for the left, nine hundred and sixty six for the right. Both very congested.”

Her English was impeccable. Angela took a quick glimpse and sure enough, on her ear, the language translator implant was attached, like people in the past would wear hearing aids. The Babylon device was really practical and convenient, but even though Angela owned one herself, she was still somehow attached to the traditional way of learning.

Her eyes drifted back to the man, a long Y shaped cut opening him from collarbones all the way down to the pubis. The death itself was rather straightforward, and she didn’t have any questions about it.

“And the tumor?”

Doctor Ahmed pulled the zipper back up, and Angela did her best to break eye contact with the man’s face as it disappeared behind black plastic. The drawer closed with a loud clang, and the woman motioned for her to follow.

Angela sped up her steps, unspeakably glad to leave the corpse behind. Years in medicine or not, she was still uncomfortable around death, particularly when it was treated in such coldly scientific, impersonal manner.

Her mentors used to tell her she had a true clinician’s heart, and perhaps that was the very reason her choice of trauma and orthopedics had been so devastating to her psyche. Surgeons were usually made of tougher stuff, better at silencing their sensitiveness, something which she definitely wasn’t.

She shoved the thought to the back of her mind and returned her attention to the pathologist, who was now removing an organ from a jar where it previously floated in a mix of alcohol and formaldehyde.

_J.B.S,_ those had been his initials. That much was always mentioned whenever a physician shared a case with another.

A case.

_The liver,_ she chided herself, turning down to face it. “Tumor of about five centimeters in diameter…”

“Five point twenty-five,” Ahmed supplied.

She closed her eyes for a split second and forced her brain to work. She hadn’t done this kind of analysis since her first internship in Zurich.

_Start from the outside and the obvious,_ the distant memory of her pathology professor rung in her mind. _Shape, color…_

“Solid, clear margins, of glandular aspect…mmh. Circular in shape.” That gave her pause. Tumoral growths that were round and uniform usually came from other places in the body rather than the liver itself. “But you mentioned it not being metastatic.”

“Couldn’t find any other occurrences on the rest of the body. That’s the primary focus, has to be. But I sent it to immunoassay for testing the surface molecules, and what I found, well…”

Angela was led out of the autopsy room, a punch of heat hitting her immediately as soon as she stepped out of the refrigerated chamber. A moment later, she was looking at a microscope slide.

“Uh…” _God damn, what is this, a trip down memory lane?_ “Lots of nuclear atypia,” she muttered. “Undifferentiated. Very. So much I wouldn’t be able to tell the source. Pseudoglandular aspect in a few spots… definitely trying to mimic… something, at least.”

It had been a long while since she’d looked at things through an optical microscope. She usually worked with much smaller particles, which required electronic equipment. “And you said the immunoassay and the DNA results…”

The pathologist handed her a clipboard with pages of seemingly meaningless letters. Angela skimmed through them, stopping every now and then to give a few lines some special attention. “Ya,” she mumbled. “That’s my sequence, all right. And you mentioned his age was twenty-nine?”

“Indeed,” the other leaned against the wall and crossed her arms.

Angela bit her bottom lip in thought. “It shouldn’t be there,” she voiced. “Immunomodulatory nanos are meant to be given exclusively pre-puberty…”

“Because they need the thymus to acquire central tolerance,” Ahmed completed. “I read your papers. Truly amazing work.”

She created had many different series of nanomachines, each with their own purpose and their own right moment to be used. This type in particular was only safe to be given to children, before the immune system was done maturing. On grown adults, it could set off autoimmune diseases.

Angela acquiesced the compliment with a nod, but didn’t speak for a full five minutes, gears turning in her head. Finally, she sighed. “I don’t know. If it was a capsid or telomerase sequence, I could blame it on him receiving regeneration nanos after the accident –”

Gamila scoffed, and Angela halted mid-sentence and raised a quizzical eyebrow. The other shook her head.

“Pardon me. It was just ludicrous to think… we could afford that kind of technology… particularly on a common citizen.”

_A nobody_ , was what she meant, and Angela gritted her teeth at the abrupt slap of reality. The immunomodulatory nanos had been a gift from her own lab to countries affected by the war, so that the children could be free from parasites that ranged from malaria to tapeworms. The results were unquestionable, causing such a drop in mortality, she’d been indicated for a Nobel peace prize.

And yet access to the newer series of nanos was far from universal, and while a few countries already offered her regeneration-type devices on emergencies, the same could not be said for most of the world.

_I did not create this tech so it could be used by a select few._

“It’s a cytokine. Synthetic. Transforming Growth Factor Beta, to be precise. Adapted for lessened fibroblast chemotaxis and…”

She tuned the woman off. She knew what her own damn nanos did.

“There’s something else.”

“Oh?” She blinked, regaining focus.

“The final piece of the puzzle. The tumor is expressing Toll.”

It took Angela a couple seconds to link the name to what it meant. Toll was a protein found in bugs, not humans, though mammals had their own similar molecules.  “You mean Toll-like receptors…?”

“No, Toll,” Ahmed insisted. “You have a tumor expressing an actual insect protein. Now, I figured when I first saw it that it would be the toll-like receptor, it’s under immunomodulation after all, but the genetic sequencing leaves no room for doubt. It’s Toll, the creepy-crawly version. This person had...bug cancer.”

_What the hell._

Angela pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. She had been running on coffee and spite for the better part of the last ten hours, and she desperately needed a meal, a shower and then some solid eight hours sleep.

_I haven’t slept eight hours since the first day I laid foot in med school._

“I… don’t know. I need time to think about this. Do you think you could have the data sent to my comm?”

“Of course, doctor Ziegler,” Angela followed the other to the exit. “The body will be kept for a couple more days, but sampling of the tumor has already been sent for further analysis. I’ll have those delivered to you when they’re done as well.”

“Thank you.” She shrugged her white coat off and bunched it under her arm.

“Feel free to ping me if you have any other questions.”

“I do,” Angela said on impulse, then instantly regretted it. But it was already done, and so she decided she might as well go all the way out. “Only one. The patient’s name…what was it?”

The pathologist blinked in surprise. On further thought, it was a stupid question – Angela didn’t expect the woman to know that at all, not when she did dozens of autopsies every single day.

“Jalil,” doctor Ahmed promptly replied. “It means ‘important’.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> HELLO FRIENDS it's time for yet another Science Story (tm).  
> Special thanks for the friends who helped me out on writing this! <3
> 
> "Oh hi Buttons, so why did you tag this story as horror?"  
> It's gonna be unspeakably awful. Seriously. Sometimes I write pharmercy fluff, but this is definitely not it.
> 
> "Oh, yikes, anything I should watch out for?"  
> I'll add the proper tags as they show up in the story!
> 
>  
> 
> **Science time!**
> 
>  
> 
> \- Tache noir of the sclera is a very interesting phenomena that happens after death: a brownish-red line stains the white of the eyes. Because it's caused by contact of the sclera with air, it tells the pathologist that the person died with them open. It also takes a few hours to form, so it's a sign the person has been dead for a while.
> 
> \- An adult left lung weights about 395g, while the right one weights about 445g. This is because the right lung is larger, since your heart occupies space to the left.
> 
> \- When a tumor starts growing on an organ, it usually does so irregularly, sometimes forming a cauliflower shape, sometimes infiltrating into normal tissue. We call metastasis if the cancer spreads from one organ to the others, and when it does, it'll usually grow in a circular shape on the liver. This is because the liver tissue will try to hold it back and prevent it from growing, and it does so uniformly.
> 
> \- The thymus is an organ very few people even know about. It stays close to the heart and it has the very important function of schooling your immune system in what is You and what is Not You and thus should be destroyed. "Central tolerance" is what we call the process of teaching your immune cells what is self and what isn't. During puberty, your thymus starts being replaced by fatty tissue, which progresses through the years until you have pretty much no thymus at all. We call this "thymic involution".
> 
> \- Capsid proteins, in this story, refers to viral capsid, which is basically the shell around the virus. A modified version of that is what Angela uses to get her nanos into the cells. Telomerase is an enzyme that makes the tips of the DNA larger; basically, it's something that prevents the cell from aging.
> 
> \- Cytokines are substances that cells use to talk to one another. Transforming growth factor beta is a very important cytokine that does about a billion different things; suffice to say it was formerly known as "tumor growth factor" and it plays a key role on the appearance of cancers.
> 
> \- Toll are a family of proteins that on insects determine the shape they grow in. Humans have similar proteins, which we call "toll-like receptors", and on us, they have a very important immunological function.


End file.
